We managed to release something yesterday - Pyflakes, a tool similar to PyChecker but about a zillion times faster and provides fewer useless warnings. The author is Phil Frost, one of our developers and the lead maintainer of the Unununium OS project. Pyflakes was previously available through his home page, but we've started hosting it on divmod.org in the hopes that it can get some wider exposure and use and raise the average index of Python code quality throughout the universe.

Can you guess what this is?



Posted for the benefit of Mr. Mesozoic

Time was, not too long ago, that you couldn't swing a dead cat around in #twisted without hitting some vastly overqualified unemployed bum. Doing a little poking around I am surprised to find that this is no longer the case.

I've been referred a number of jobs, most in the NY/Boston area but a few out on the left coast, that involve Python and Twisted (and some PyWin32) work, and I haven't found any qualified people yet.

If you are around one of those areas or willing to telecommute or relocate, please drop me a line.

I just found out that there is a class at UCLA that uses Twisted as part of its curriculum. Even better, this class is apparently taught by Paul Eggert, of Bison (and other free software) fame.

I don't even know what to say about this.

As predicted, members of my family and various friends were better to me than I deserve on my birthday.

I have yet to figure out exactly which features to fund, but I think that I'm going to be giving out small prizes, probably in $20US increments, for each one. For those of you across the puddle, that's about €0.02 at a time - but it's still enough to buy dinner over here.

Thanks to everyone who sent a donation in, and thanks especially to Kim, who trudged up to Boston and helped contain the hellmouth in my apartment.

(As any ADD sufferer will testify, piles are the enemy. When one's cohabitant has an entire house and 3 whole lifetimes worth of stuff to pile up, the piles can set you up for a crushing and continuous defeat, which is definitely no good for one's mental health, creating a feedback loop where one is discouraged or even afraid to organize things.)

Kim defeated even the piles which we had made an uneasy truce with, the ones which we had actively tried to clean up before and had been resigned to treat as simply a messy storage solution rather than a problem. With the piles trapped and cornered, the floors are walkable and the surfaces usable. Who knew that using a vacuum cleaner could be so much fun?